The past few days have been a cosmic convergence of opinions about extraterrestrial life. First, I’ve been interviewing scientists and engineers who think that funding searches for planets that might support life isn’t unreasonable. Second, a neighbor told me he’d read in the New York Times that extraterrestrial life almost certainly had evolved somewhere, some […]
That’s Jim Gunn up there, concentrating on his camera. Jim’s camera shouldn’t really qualify for a week of posts celebrating uncelebrated technology because it was famous for quite a while. It was inventive and perfectly made and did something no camera had ever done: it digitized the sky. But like most new and wonderful technologies, the […]
This week LWON reminds you of all the mundane, unimpressive, uncelebrated things that are nevertheless worth celebrating. The advice of early mentors often has unexpected weight; we keep following it long after we’ve grown up and become mentors ourselves. Helen’s first mentor in journalism, the excellent Joanne Silberner, gave her advice about the complex and […]
July 11 – 15, 2016 Jessa updates a post about the Berger Inquiry, the time that the Canadian government actually asked the people who were here first what they wanted to do with the land that belonged to them in the first place. Rose’s backyard in Brooklyn is full of squirrels fighting, not just the […]
July 4 – 8, 2016 What do you do when, as usual in America, people get shot? Only this time you’re first on the scene? And you’re in charge? And years afterward, you still see the scene, over and over? Craig’s friend tells stories to little kids, over and over. Michelle writes about little kids […]
Every year, some media entity terrifies the nation with a Shark Week. We here at LWON feel strongly that sharks, while terrifying, look scary and live in the ocean and therefore are pretty easy to recognize and avoid. Much harder to recognize and avoid are the innocent-looking, furry, feathery animals that under the pretense of […]
June 20 – 24, 2016 I start researching for a story and you know how that goes, rabbit hole, branching rabbit hole, another branch, another, and pretty soon I’m so far into Ballykilcline and Texas I’m never coming home. After a day in which we, for the first time in history, forgot to post anything, […]
I’m having trouble with a story. First I went down one rabbit hole (the effects, on both sides of the Atlantic, of the Irish Potato Famine) until it branched into two (now-dead towns, one in Maryland, one in Ireland), and then I went down both. You can picture me heading down one, scrambling back up, […]